


Trigger Discipline

by nevermindirah



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Body Horror, Crack, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Guns, Non-Graphic Violence, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:15:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28769175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevermindirah/pseuds/nevermindirah
Summary: "You... you have each other. And all I have is my grief, and all this dick shrapnel, because I never learned trigger discipline."Or, five times Booker shot his own dick off and one time he didn’t.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Comments: 56
Kudos: 126





	Trigger Discipline

**Author's Note:**

> This exists because [rubynye](https://rubynye.tumblr.com/) messaged me the following:
> 
> _how many times has Booker died by shooting his dick off, or through his femoral artery? and he lies there cursing in French as he bleeds out and everyone else rolls around laughing too hard to even try to save him._
> 
> Thanks also to [outlawarya](https://outlawarya.tumblr.com/) for egging me on and to [this iconic ngoveronicas post](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/post/639790730391502849).

1\. 

Sébastien has been running around with these ancient weirdos for two years now. He doubts he’ll ever stop feeling devastated that he will never be laid to rest next to Mélanie, that he had to watch their sons die hating him. But if he’s stuck living again and again, he supposes he could do a lot worse than Andromache, Yusuf, and Nicolò for company.

For one thing, this new life of his, joining his new team in battle for causes they believe in and not because a certain megalomaniacal connard forced battle upon him, allows him to fully indulge his interest in new technologies.

There’s a printing press with his name on it, Andromache says, in a safehouse of theirs outside Prague. It will be a while before they make it that far east, so in the meantime Sébastien will content himself with technologies of war.

Like the Colt Paterson pistol he’s finally holding in his own two hands. Mass-produced firearms. What a world.

Sébastien is so excited by his new acquisition that he hasn’t bothered to arrange for a holster for it. It’s the wrong shape for the scabbard where he keeps his dagger, and it’s too small to sling over his shoulder like a rifle.

Waistband it is.

There’s only one problem: this marvel of the modern age doesn’t have a trigger guard. The trigger folds into the assembly and emerges upon cocking the hammer.

He hasn’t thought this through when he cocks the hammer before withdrawing his new Colt from his waistband.

And that’s the first time Sébastien shoots his own dick off.

* * *

2\. 

Andy, as she prefers to be called even when not in men’s clothes, has dubbed him Booker, and that suits him just fine.

Booker’s life is an endless cycle of bickering with his new family, getting drunk, getting a few hours’ sleep in between nightmares he speaks of as little as possible, and entertaining himself and/or making himself useful with inks and paper and guns and explosives. It’s not so bad. Nicky and Joe are both excellent cooks when they can get their hands on decent provisions. And when Booker can’t sleep, Andy tells him about jaw-dropping things like the fireworks she saw in China a few thousand years ago, or they sit in companionable silence passing a bottle between them.

Don’t get him wrong, he’s still miserable. Just making the best of a shit situation.

He keeps secrets much bigger than that time he was playing around with his new Colt and shot his dick off. He wrote a strongly worded letter to Samuel Colt himself and moved on with this valuable new knowledge about the importance of trigger guards.

This year he’s survived a second French Revolution and half a dozen other revolutions besides. He’s learned so many new ways to blow up enemies and their materiel, including the memorable night he got so drunk with some victorious Serbs that he shoved a rag in his nearly-empty bottle of rotgut, lit the rag on fire, and threw it at a portrait of some Habsburg connard.

It’s just his luck that they’re packing up for a trip south and a break from strangers’ revolutions when he fumbles his favorite pistol. Andy, Joe, and Nicky get front-row seats to him shooting his dick off. He is stone-cold sober, and maybe that’s the problem.

His dick grows back fine, just like last time, but his family are never going to let him hear the end of this.

* * *

3\. 

They’re dusting themselves off after dispatching a group of Confederates who managed to surprise them.

Yes, Booker was drinking on watch. No, he didn’t fall asleep on watch. No, that doesn’t make it ok.

Yes, he did accidentally pull the trigger while he was drawing his pistol out of his waistband.

Andy sighs deeply. “We’ve been over this, Book. When we get sliced up, whatever makes us immortal heals the remaining chunk of our bodies that has our brain in it.”

“...I know?”

“Because you shooting your dick off over and over has me wondering,” she says. “Are you trying to make yourself a friend, hoping your dick will regenerate another you?”

Joe waggles his eyebrows. “Hoping to make yourself a lover, perhaps?”

“You know that you are always welcome to ask any of us if you want to cuddle,” Nicky says.

“Fuck you all,” Booker grumbles. “Need I remind you that I’m the only one here who hasn’t died by tripping and falling on their own sword?”

* * *

4\. 

Today Booker tripped and fell on his own sword.

Why the fuck he was even using a sword when the new millennium is just a few years away is anybody’s guess. The least the universe can do tonight is let him get a decent night’s rest.

He wakes from yet another horrifying dream of Quỳnh drowning because there’s a rustling noise coming from the kitchen. He’s awake and standing and drawing his gun from his waistband and stalking towards the kitchen well before he’s really processed what’s happening.

There’s a fucking raccoon in their fridge.

Booker flips the gun around in his hand with a heavy sigh. He runs at the creature like he’s going to pistol-whip it out the door — seems fair game for an animal with creepy little human hands — but he likes to think it’s the aggressive eye-rolling that gets the beast to leave.

He thinks it’s pretty understandable, given everything that’s happened to him in the last 18 hours, that when he flips the gun back around and shoves it in his waistband his finger has unconsciously found the trigger.

There goes his dick. Again.

At least— 

No, wait, there’s Nicky, wide awake and laughing at the bloodstain blooming across the front of his pants.

* * *

5\. 

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Nile says— no, _shrieks_.

She texts him sometimes, has since about a month into his exile. He wouldn’t say they’re friends exactly. More like she seems to find him amusing and he doesn’t dare hope it goes any deeper. So when she called him last week and asked him for help on this mission, he didn’t even think about it, just asked where and when.

They’re both armed to the teeth, no holster or pocket empty. When they kill their target and Booker takes the shitstain’s precious antique revolver off of him, he does what he’s always done when he’s got a handgun and no better place to store it and puts it down the front of his pants.

Nile squints her eyes at him.

He shrugs at her. “Final sweep before we get out of here?”

She nods. She’s still looking at him funny, but he’s lived with far worse.

They’re about done with their sweep when it happens. The ship they’re on rocks violently and it knocks something in the damn antique. Before he knows it Booker has, yet again, taken friendly fire to the dick.

“This again,” he mutters.

“Again?? The fuck is wrong with you?”

“Shit happens,” he says, and he’s trying to play it cool, because shit does indeed happen, and she seems— more upset than the situation calls for. “Why are you more mad about this than I am?”

“I can’t ride your dick if you’ve shot it off, now can I?” she shouts at him.

Wait.

_What?_

Nile is now muttering to herself in a language Booker doesn’t recognize. She’s 56 years old, of course she’s picked up languages Booker doesn’t know, but it still pulls him up short. For all she texts him with increasing frequency, they still barely know each other.

(When he asks her about it later, he finds out it’s [Potawatomi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potawatomi_language), and Nile’s been doing her part to revive and protect Algonquian languages. How this goddess deigns to speak to him, let alone _want him_ , blows his damn mind.)

Over their comms, Joe and Nicky are absolutely _losing their minds_ laughing at him.

No, wait. Joe and Nicky are laughing their faces off at _both of them_.

* * *

+1. 

“Again,” Nile says.

Booker pulls the gun out from his waistband, from the small of his back — “ _The only part of your waistband you are ever allowed to place a gun, you beautiful dumbass_ ,” chorusing in his head.

He slides the safety off, points at the target, shoots, pauses to sweep his eyes over the field. Slides the safety back on. Tucks the gun back in the only part of his waistband he is ever allowed to place a gun.

Nile plants a quick kiss on his shoulder as she switches out the Glock for the antique Smith & Wesson.

“And again,” she says.

So he goes again.

They’ve been doing two-a-day gun safety drills all week. Today Joe and Nicky video called them at lunch, and the way they needle him for shooting his own dick off makes him feel— loved? Yes. It makes him feel loved. Joe and Nicky aren’t reveling in his pain, they’re teasing their brother.

Nile and Joe spend most of the video call shit-talking the museum Booker took Nile to yesterday, and that makes him feel loved too.

He’s under no illusions about his exile ending early. And he knows that the engraved invitation — literally, a rock with a date and coordinates on it — Andy left on the porch of Nile’s safehouse yesterday is going to involve the most extreme shovel talk in all of human history.

But when Nile climbs into his lap on the couch that night, he thinks it was all worth it. The centuries of suffering were worth it if it’s what it cost for him to survive to see this moment.

“It’s not my job to fix you and you don’t owe me orgasms for teaching you basic goddamn trigger discipline, yeah yeah healthy relationships whatever.” She pauses. Looks deep into his eyes and slowly lets a smirk wash over her face. “You ready to work on a different kind of trigger discipline?”

“Always,” he says, and he leans up to kiss her.

**Author's Note:**

> I... did more research than was strictly necessary for this. The [Colt Paterson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Paterson) was the first mass-produced handgun (possibly the first mass-produced gun? I couldn't find details on the first mass-produced long gun), in 1836 around when Booker joined the team. It really does have a collapsible trigger. I don't know shit about guns but this seems like a bad idea.
> 
> I've decided that Booker invented the [Molotov cocktail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov_cocktail) about a century early and I stand by it.
> 
> Connard is French for motherfucker, bastard, piece of shit, etc.
> 
> This piece of absurdity is one of several things I've done this week to cope with living in Washington DC as white nationalist insurrectionists plan a second armed attack on my city. **Talk to your people about white nationalism** if you aren't already, and fellow US readers, **educate yourself about[the need for](https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc) [DC statehood](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/08/washington-dc-statehood-faq/)**. Two of the many shitty things about DC not being a state are [we don't control our own National Guard](https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-hindered-dc-national-guard-response-to-insurrection-attempt-report-2021-1) and [Congress has the opportunity to veto any law passed by our locally elected leaders](https://wamu.org/story/17/09/18/schoolhouse-block-d-c-bill-becomes-law-sometimes-doesnt/) (which Republicans take advantage of to fuck with things like DC gun control laws).
> 
> Aaaaaaaaaaaaand now back to fun stuff. [Come yell at me about our elderly friends on Tumblr!](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/)


End file.
